Stalking Your Status Update

There was a time, not too long ago, when I could update my Facebook status to something as simple as the latest Beyoncè lyric or a full description of my breakfast that morning and not expect a backlash of judgment and over analysis. No longer. Ever since the January 25 Revolution, we now live in a ‘new age’ where personal opinions expressed through our profiles determine our position on the country, make people rethink their friendship with us and cause an argument over the next family dinner. But who would’ve thought that our allegedly ‘personal profiles’ could also put us behind bars. In late October, Ayman Yousef Mansour was sentenced to three years in jail for insulting Islam on his Facebook page after a Cairo court found him guilty of posting comments denigrating the religion, the Qur’an and the Prophet. Naturally, the international media had a field day with this story, dragging it down the usual ‘Egypt threatened by fears of an Islamist government’ route. Mansour created the Facebook page “Al-Monadel Mard” (The Disease Fighter) and, according to the court, used it to express opinions that threaten national unity. He was arrested by the Department for Combating Electronic Crimes at the Ministry of Interior, which identified the location from which Mansour was sending out his online comments. Mansour is the second person in Egypt to be sent to jail based on charges of ‘contempt to religion.’ The first was Karim Amer, who was arrested in 2007 for insulting Islam and then-president Hosni Mubarak on his blog. But beyond the Islamic boogeyman routine, the incident underlines a much deeper concern: freedom of expression. Egypt has long suffered from blatant infringements on freedom of expression. And while we may have thought for a brief second that basic human rights were going to be given to us after the toppling of the former oppressive regime, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces has proven time and time again that it would rather we continue flogging a dead horse — said horse being the ousted president — rather than start focusing on the current circumstances. There has been a number of journalists and bloggers called in for questioning after they spoke out about different aspects related to the state of the country. But when the muzzling starts creeping into the private sphere, targeting average citizens on their personal profiles, then nobody is safe. In extreme cases such as in China, where there are over 60 internet regulations implemented by the government, websites such as Facebook are banned altogether and internet users aren’t even allowed to send secret or reactionary material over the internet, even through email. The tricky thing about the internet is that the lines between public and private are beyond blurred, and not everyone knows how to differentiate. Even the internet users themselves often consider a personal opinion expressed through a status update an invitation to start a fight. How, then, can authorities draw the line between when they can intervene in a case of blasphemy, which is a crime under Egyptian law, and when they should accept it as a matter of personal opinion. Even though Facebook has acted as a political blog for some people over the last couple of months, it is nowhere near being one. The whole idea of blogging is to use the internet as a platform for spreading your message to as many people as possible, the same way I’m using this printed page in a magazine to reach a wide audience whose political or social affiliations are unknown to me. However, with Facebook, no matter how broad your social networking is, you always stay within the confines of your friend list, your comfort zone. In a nutshell, Facebook is safe, or is meant to be — blogging isn’t and will never be. So when people express their opinion on Facebook, it is the equivalent of sharing a heated comment with a group of friends over coffee. And if authorities are clamping down on opinions expressed through personal profiles, should we then expect to also be punished for personal conversations? Imagine censoring your text messages and emails, not discussing current affairs with your taxi driver or keeping conversations with your coworkers strictly professional. Mansour’s sentencing has brought that scenario a step closer to reality. But while monitoring personal opinions is a far greater infringement on freedom of expression than monitoring newspapers, satellite channels or blogs, the backlash against authorities right now may just be too great to let the powers that be become an Orewellian Big Brother. After all, millions spoke out against the former regime. Could they put millions in jail?